How do virtual waiting rooms work?
A deep dive into how virtual waiting rooms and queue management systems work to prevent system overloads and crashes; Know from Queue Fair Experts.
Manage traffic peaks. Avoid website crashes from high demand.
Treat your visitors with unrivalled fairness.
Queue-Fair is the original virtual waiting room for busy websites, invented by us and originally patented in 2004. When your site has more visitors than it can handle gracefully, the excess visitors are automatically sent away from your webservers to a branded online queue - it then sends visitors back to your site in first-come, first-served order at the rate that you desire.
We handle the world's largest queues. We queue hundreds of thousands of people every day.
By using the world's most accurate, highest quality, most powerful and best value Virtual Waiting Room platform, you ensure that your site can keep selling at its optimum transaction rate. Your site visitors, shoppers, ticket buyers, and app users always get the responsive experience they require, even when you are really busy. They won't see a crashed site.
‘Love the service, Support is top notch from start of the event till the end. Our event was completed flawlessly thanks to Queue-Fair, and everything worked beyond good 👍 We are delighted that we chose the Queue-Fair service. Queue-Fair meant we could sell online tickets for show without taking a hit on infrastructure and going down. There is nothing to dislike - service is overall awesome.’
‘We work with some of the biggest brands out there and with that comes a large demand during sales and drops. We need a fair queuing platform to provide all customers with a fair and painless experience when engaging with our platform. Queue-Fair was not only very easy to implement - in a day! - and ran smoothly, but also the team understood our needs and were able to work with us to achieve our goals.’
‘When we opened COVID vaccinations to 16-29 year-olds, we turned to Queue-Fair for help, who quickly set us up with a fully branded Virtual Waiting Room. That afternoon, Queue-Fair fairly queued 450,000 people for us. Queue-Fair meant our system was able to accept bookings at a rate it could handle, without overload. We're very grateful for the exceptional support from Queue-Fair, and we launched with great success. The queue worked perfectly, and helped us to overcome a punctual uncovered technical problem that otherwise would have ruined the campaign. Thank you very very much Queue-Fair for your offering! It’s much appreciated. Queue-Fair saved us!’
‘This solution has enabled me to manage online sales, without any hassle. It's an easy-to-use solution that lets us intervene in real time on the flow of visitors we let through. Easy to configure, you can even customize the visuals and texts of the queue. Special thanks to Matt who explained it all to me in French, available and efficient, thanks again Matt! Before using this service, our web server was experiencing slowdown problems and was becoming inaccessible. By controlling the flow of visitors, we were able to rectify this problem.’
‘Amazing support and great tool. I loved the simplicity of setup and use. Queue-Fair enabled us to manage traffic during the launch. Last year our site went down and we had issues with that! This year problem was solved by simple adding Queue-Fair script.’
‘Excellent service. We use Queue-Fair monthly and it has been working great. We called Queue-Fair on Sunday evening because we were doing a drop. They answered immediately and solved the problem within five minutes! They saved our drop and did everything very quickly!’
‘High value for money and easy to use, very good product, easy to implement and use. It can be adapted to different websites and pages and it has a very good customer service. It manages waiting room in order to not stress our websites during the launch of important ticketing events. Recommended!’
‘Extremely great product for traffic control. We needed a smooth user experience on the first days of the launch, which was only achievable by adding Queue-Fair. We liked how easy Queue Fair was to set up in several languages. Code customisation possibilities were great, and we aligned the waiting room to our design system. Support was extremely helpful along the way, too. Highly recommended. Queue-Fair did its job great.’
‘After a rush of people all trying to buy tickets at the same time for one of our popular theatre shows, Queue-Fair stepped in with a fully branded Virtual Waiting Room to protect our servers. I'm very happy to have found them. I like it very much, the whole concept and the flexibility. Thank you, Queue-Fair!’
‘We solved our extreme overload on website problem with Queue-Fair. We are very happy and we want to stay with them for the future, the service and support is excellent! Very easy, and extremly helpful staff! All went so smooth with implementation! There is nothing to dislike with this company!’
‘Queue-Fair is a Lifesaver! It was fast and simple to start working with them. Sooo fast and simple - 2 steps 1 day! Massive presale events used to make our site collapse, now people get into a virtual line - very efficient. I recommend Queue-Fair to others, without doubt!’
‘Robust, lifesaver and easy to implement! We love how fast you can start using it and with a very user-friendly interface. There are no downsides of using Queue-Fair, which solved our problem of high traffic management in certains moments so we don't miss any sales and keep customer experience good as possible! Everything that I was expecting to resolve my problems with high traffic was resolved as soon as I implemented Queue-Fair.’
Even the world's biggest companies get overwhelmed by peaks in demand, particularly sudden peaks. Systems architects make decisions based on expected demand and usual traffic rates. It is usually not possible to scale the tech serving your site on demand to prevent a website crash. All webservers have limits, and when they are exceeded, your visitors experience a crashed site.
More Orders
People who have been queued are keener to purchase and buy more - as much as 20% more in each shopping cart, according to our customers.
More Customers
Queue-Fair means you can serve new customers even when your servers are too busy to handle them. People who see an error page or no response at all from your site are unlikely to return - but you can reach all these people with Queue-Fair.
More Fair
Our unique synchronized people ahead counter means that people in the queue can always see that it is moving fairly.
More Ethical
Fairness matters to your visitors, and of course to us! We ensure no-one loses their place in our original first-come, first-served queues, and that visitors arrive at your site in the same order that they joined the queue. That's why we invented it in the first place.
More Fun
Animated progress bars in a range of brand-matching styles. Our unique synchronized ticking People Ahead Counter shows visitors that the queue is always moving forward, and always moving fairly.
Safeguard your website from crashes, peaks, bots and also your company's ethical reputation
More Safe
Discover the wealth of security features available with Queue-Fair to protect your site, app or NFT drop from malicious use.
More Responsible
Our wonderful customers tell us we're lovely people and a pleasure to deal with - and that's what really matters to us. We created the Virutal Waiting Room to make the world a fairer place, so you can be sure of our core values. We always put our customers first. Always.
More Value
Our proprietary process is cheaper to run than any other method. We pass on the cost savings to you. This also allows us to give you more on our Free Tier service than any other provider.
More Speed
Our process means we run the fastest queue servers in the world, and offer unlimited queue capacity on all our service plans.
More Opportunity
Keep the customers that you would lose to your competitors during costly down time. Use your queues to show product slideshows, videos or personalised marketing content to your visitors while they wait.
More Equitable
Our PreSale randomiser prevents touts & scalpers from snapping up all your tickets or stock, and we can use the queue to enforce one-order-per-customer for you too.
More Reliable
We run the most accurate Virtual Waiting Room service and will send you the exact right number of people each and every minute - the key to stable load on your servers. Unlike other providers our queues turn on the very instant that you need them too.
Adapters in every major web server language. Secure Plugins for every major ecommerce platform. Or, add Queue-Fair to your site with JavaScript with one line of code on your page - or no lines at all with Google Tag Manager.
You can also run Queue-Fair at the Network-edge, running on your CDN or Cloud Services provider before requests reach your origin server.
Adapters available for your busy iOS, Android and React Native apps too.
Find out why Queue-Fair is the most widely-integrated queue platform on earth.
Protect your e-commerce site from costly down time
Queue-Fair helps you reach the customers that would be lost when your systems are overloaded, so your site or app can keep selling at its optimum transaction rate.
Sell all your tickets in one day safely and securely
Prevent the dreaded Refresh Refresh Refresh that kills your servers and damages fan loyalty. Show them that you care about their experience with our fair queue.
Cope gracefully with events, registrations and enrolments
You needn't scale your systems just for one busy day a year. Queue-Fair is fair and transparent for your students - who can go away and come back later without losing their place.
Handle massive public demand effortlessly and safely
Why stress out your IT department or your stakeholders? Conserve your resources and cope with any level of demand gracefully with Queue-Fair.
Invented and originally patented in 2004, Queue-Fair is the original Virtual Waiting Room, providing online queue management for busy websites and apps.
2026 The Fair Queue People Ltd. - All Rights Reserved.
Part of the Orderly family of queue solutions - OrderlyQ - OrderlyStats - WeQ4U